One of my favorite figures of history is King Aethelred the Unready, King of England from 978-1016, conquered by the Danes and a truly sad figure, who was, apparently, aptly named.
More recently, the nickname of "Tricky" to President Richard M. Nixon and "Slick" to President Wiliam J. Clinton have become almost like actual birth names and as descriptive as "Unready" was to poor Aethelred.
Governor Sarah Palin is cleary a leading contender for such a nickname and I propose "Palin the Preposterous" although "Palin the Pretender" has merit both as to a reference to a throne occupied by another and the late 90's TV show about a person capable of insinuating themself into another walk of life. I will leave "Pretender" to those who prefer it and focus on "Preposterous" as a proper label for the McCain pick for VEEP.
The importannce of finding and using the right words to help sell a product or candidate, or defeat the candidate, is regularly discussed during campaigns by the likes of Frank Luntz, usually seen on Fox News now, but who has been running focus groups that use little boxes with dials to gage their response to what they see and hear. Leaving aside any scientific reliability to this wiz-bang gimmickry, we all know that labels do matter, despite the playground singsong that "words can never hurt me".
Preposterous is commonly defined in standard dictionaries by such words as absurd, ridiculous, senseless, contrary to nature, reason or common sense and inverted (Websters) In "A Concise Etymological Dictionary", 1882, is the definition of "hindsides before" which I find more descriptive. A Thesaurus (Random House) includes such words as outrageous, ludicrous, unthinkable, fatuous, foolish, silly, idiotic, stupid, inane, nonsensical, laughable, irrational, unreasonable and bizarre. All these certainly apply to the idea of Governor Palin being qualified to be Vice President, let alone President, of the United States.
The selection of Governor Palin is being analyzed many places and seems to fit the description of politics given by Joe McGinniss in "The Selling of the President, 1968" where he said, "Politics, in a sense, has always been a con game(p. 19)
In "What's the Matter with Kansas" Frank Thomas wrote in 2004 that "The enemy of the plain people of good ol' red-state America is intellectuals"(p. 192) He notes that this is an anti intellectual rallying point and references David Brooks, now of the New York Times and The News Hour, with his discussion of the "Resume Gods" as a target of the right wing. Perhaps Governor Palin was selected by Karl Rove and the other advisors of Senator McCain as the focus for such a campaign strategy?
Such an approach is certainly in keeping with the Lee Atwater and Karl Rove approach as described in "Bad Boy" by John Brady at pages 180-193 and "Boy Genius" by Lou DuBose (p. 71) in discussing races Rove and Karen Hughes were involved in, like that of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who was thought to be a leading female contender for McCain's selection of a woman for the VEEP position. It is also discussed by James Moore and Wayne Slater in both "Bush's Brain" and "The Architect". In "The Architect" their discussion also reveals the weakness of this approach if the candidate's reputation can be undermined. They quote Karl Rove as noting that victory in politics involves seeing that one's "own supporters are brought to the polls by someone they hold in confidence" (p. 274). That would seem to apply to the candidate as well as the get out the vote worker who drives the voter to the election site.
In "Going Negative" authors Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, in 1995 set out the research that appears to explain the conduct of those like Atwater and Rove and therefore their successful campaigns for Republicans in local and national races. The authors list among their key findings, the following:
Republican viewers find negative advertisements to be significantly more persuasive than positive messages. Democratic viewers find positive commercials to be more compelling.
Independents are generally unresponsive to political advertising with the important exception of negative commercials.(p. 64
)
Among the advertising campaigns they discuss is the Willie Horton ad and its effect on Republican leaning suburban voters and African American voters.
This research and campaign planning is nothing new. Richard Hofstadter discussed it in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in America". He described the Eisenhower administration by saying "business had come back into power". He said, after twenty years of the FDR and Truman administrations and Democratic rule that business had come back into power and "Now the intellectual . . . would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor". (p. 4) This does, of course, perfectly fit with the attacks on Barack Obama as "elite" and from Harvard, which also was specifically discussed by Professor Hofstadter. (Professor Hofstadter was from Columbia University and had retired before Senator Obama obtained his undergraduate degree at Columbia College in Political Science.)
The success of well crafted language in achieving success was also the topic of several books by V.O. Key, Jr., one of the great researchers into what contributes to success in elections. In "The Responsible Electorate", in 1966, in a chapter entitled "The Voice of the People: the Echo" he asked:
What circumstances move voters to shift their preferences in this direction or that? What clever propaganda tactic or slogan led to this result?"
(p. 1
)
In his landmark book, "Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups", V.O. Key, Jr. wrote in 1964 as follows:
On occasion the electorate votes a party out of power in a decisive manner; it expresses clearly a lack of confidence in those who have been in charge of affairs. The mandate of the incoming party may be vague, and, indeed, it may be difficult to read into the vote a bill of explicit dissatisfactions with the party that has been cast out of office. Yet the election clearly expresses a widespread unhappiness with past performance. To this sort of election the term 'landslide" may be applied. . . (p. 522)
In the hope of such a landslide for the Obama-Biden ticket over the McCain-Palin (Palin the Preposterous) ticket, I close with the following observation from the late Molly Ivins who discussed Rush Limbaugh in her book "Who Let the Dogs In". Ms. Ivins said of Rush Limbaugh that "I say it's important to point out that he's not just wrong, but that he's ridiculous, one of the silliest people in America." (p. 286)
I urge that in keeping with the above, Governor Palin be called "Palin the Preposterous" for surely her selection as a Vice Presidential candidate at this point in her career is ridiculous, outrageous, absurd, unreasonable, fatuous, foolish, inbecilic, asinine, idiotic, laughable, hindsides before, stupid, inane, bizarre and one of the silliest in the history of politics in America
Republican viewers find negative advertisements to be significantly more persuasive than positive messages. Democratic viewers find positive commercials to be more compelling.
Independents are generally unresponsive to political advertising with the important exception of negative commercials.(p. 64)